A short while ago there was a news story saying that residents of a small Queensland town were flummoxed after six mysterious metal spheres washed ashore on Forrest Beach.
The unmarked objects, which resembled oversized silver basketballs, prompted police to close off the area amid concerns that they could be explosive.
Several days later, Australia’s space agency announced that the spheres appeared to be pressure vessels from a space launch vehicle.
An interesting enough little story (and one that conspiracy theories could have fun with!)—but what caught my attention was this strange word ‘flummox.’
You and I have often used this, but have we ever given any thought to where such a strange word came from?
So, let’s check it out.
The verb ‘to flummox’ means ‘To bewilder, confuse, confound, perplex, disconcert.’
It’s recorded from 1837, and the first person to use it was Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers.
But where did Dickens get it from?
No one is exactly sure.
Given his genius it is possible Dickens just made up the word—perhaps based on other imitative or expressive formulations he had heard.
Somewhere in background behind ‘flummox’ there may be (the Oxford Dictionary suggests) an English regional dialect word.
They refer to some of the odd local dialect words from Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, South Cheshire, and Sheffield—such words as ‘flummocks’ (which meant to maul or mangle), ‘flummock’ (which meant to make untidy or disordered) and a similar word that meant to confuse or bewilder.
The lexicographers at the Oxford comment that ‘The formation seems to be onomatopoeic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily.’
And it seems that out of these verbal threads floating around the place Dickens gave us ‘flummox’ (his spelling).
And we’ve had it ever since.
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